The English construction there from the point of view of communicative syntax

The thematic part of the sentence contains what is the subject of the statement, the rhematic part contains what is reported about it. It is easy to see that such a characteristic of the topic and rhema of the sentence is close to the traditional logical-content definition of the main members of the sentence, subject and predicate. Often it is the group of the subject that is communicatively the topic of the statement, and the group of the predicate is its rhema.
The communicative division of the sentence may or may not coincide with the logical division of the judgment expressed by it. Thus, in the sentence John is ill, from the point of view of logical division, a certain logical predicate (to be ill) is attributed to a certain logical object (John) within the framework of the judgment expressed by this sentence. At the same time, from a communicative point of view, in this sentence, something unknown is reported about the subject of speech already known from the previous context / situation - John (topic, topic, given) earlier (rhema, commentary, new), namely that he is sick. Here we have a case of coincidence of logical and actual divisions of the sentence. On the contrary, in the sentence It is John who is ill, the logical interpretation of the judgment expressed by him remains exactly the same as that of the sentence John is ill, but the communicative interpretation (and hence the actual division) will be different: the message about John will act as new, rhematic information, and the information that he is sick will act as known, thematic information. Thus, The last example is characterized by a mismatch, not a coincidence of logical and communicative divisions.
The complexity of the analysis of the topic-rhematic organization of the sentence is associated with its contextual dependence with the possibility of localizing the factors that determine the topic-rhematic division outside the language. The same sentence, even of the simplest two-membered composition, can be interpreted differently in thematic terms. Here is an example.
If the teacher sees that the group is in the classroom in an incomplete composition and in response to his words I see someone is absent today. (Who is absent?) receives the answer Petrov is absent, then the topic of this statement will be is absent, and the remu will be Petrov, because in essence what is reported is The one who is absent today is Petrov. In a different situation, in a different dialogical text, the distribution may be different. So, if the sentence Petrov is absent comes from the audience as a speech reaction to the teacher's statement Today I'm going to ask Petrov, then it has a thematically subject Petrov and a rematic predicate is absent. Thus, two implementations of a single sentence appear as: Petrov (R) is absent (T) and Petrov ( T) is absent (R ). At the same time, the judgment conveyed by these two actualizations of the sentence, if they are considered in terms of predicate logic (here it is the judgment of definition), is unchanged.
The dichotomous communicative structure of the sentence is not mandatory in all cases, since one-word sentences are possible (for example, in plays, the announcement of a servant about the arrival of a guest - rhem) and the rhematicity or thematicity of the entire composition of a polynomial sentence (for example, the whole sentence It was drizzling and rather cold (D. Lessing) that opens the paragraph).
Naturally, for the purposes of grammatical description, the most interesting are the linguistic means by which the topic-rhematic organization of the sentence is signaled. These tools are diverse:

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  Intonation;
  
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  Word order;
  
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  Syntactic constructions
  
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  Lexical means.
  

All this, however, is an additional means, in the sense that it is a means of special emphasis, highlighting, bearing the stamp of logical and (often) emotional emphasis. Normally, for the vast majority of implemented proposals, the means of thematic organization of the sentence is the distribution of the composition of the sentence between the subject and the predicate and, accordingly, the introduction of the name or nominal group into the position of the subject, which is given the status of the topic. The fact that the distribution given by the norms of language can change under the influence of the situation or context does not give the latter the status of the main factor. The situation and context are a powerful means of neutralizing any systemic-linguistic oppositions, including not only grammatical ones, but they lie outside the language system. They cannot be central to the grammatical system and, accordingly, the grammatical description.
It should also be noted that the set of methods for isolating rhema is not universal, but idioethnic, and it has been identified with a sufficient degree of completeness for many languages. For English, the following methods of indication of rhema are usually indicated as leading.

1. 
   The so-called klefted, or split, structures (cleft constructions). The klefted construction is convenient because it can be used to rematize almost any component of the English sentence.
   
2. 
   Article determination, when the indefinite article acts as a rhema marker. The actualization function of the article is especially clearly manifested in a comparative analysis of sentences that are identical in all parameters (with the exception of article determination): compare The boy entered the room and A boy entered the room. In the first sentence, the noun boy – the subject of the message; It assumes that there is some prior context in which the boy has already been mentioned, so the question to which this sentence could be an answer would be formulated as follows: What did the boy do? In the second sentence, in contrast to the first, the noun boy is the rhema of the message; it presupposes the existence of a subsequent context in which additional information about the boy mentioned for the first time would be reported. The question to which this proposal could be answered should be formulated as follows: Who entered the room?
   
3. 
   Word order, the rigor of which is usually exaggerated by normative grammars, can also serve as an important means of actual division. At the same time, it should be noted that if in Russian language the word order is the leading means of highlighting the rhema (the usual order of the communicative division in a declarative sentence is "theme - rhema"): The boy entered the room - let's compare A boy entered the room ), then in English, word order as a factor of actual division is possible only due to a certain "backlash", a certain degree of freedom of sentence elements allowed by contextual and situational conditions.
   
4. 
   Phrasal (logical) stress is an important means of highlighting rhema, especially in oral speech. So, the sentence Father was angry about Jack's departure, almost every member of it can be rematized with the help of phrasal stress.
   
5. 
   Английская конструкция, известная под названием «there be construction», вовсе не случайно требует использования существительных либо с неопределенным артиклем, либо с его аналогом – местоимением some (в отрицательном и вопросительном вариантах any) – она также является одним из механизмов рематизации: There was a pen on the table; There were some flowers scattered around; Were there any people there? (сравнить с невозможными * There was pen on the table; There were flowers scattered around; * Were there the people there? ).
   

So, the construction of a sentence in accordance with the rules of its actual division is an important communicatively relevant task, since in speech the speaker not only informs the listener of certain facts, but also builds some kind of informationally significant hierarchy, selectively places accents and thereby controls the attention of the listener. The latter, understanding the unequal informational significance for him of individual segments of the speaker's speech, can correctly perceive the signals sent to him by the author of the message regarding the unequal information significance of various elements of the speech stream and focus his attention on those that carry new, important information for him.
The lexical semantics of a word largely predetermines its strong or weak accent position, its gravitation towards the thematic or rhematic part of the utterance. Detecting the relationship between the lexical meaning of a word and its potential stress or unstressed in a phrase will allow you to clarify the lexicographic description of the meanings. In particular, reliance on such connections contributes to a more subtle differentiation of the meanings of polysemic lexemes. To accent highlighting gravitates in the first turn vocabulary with subjective-evaluative, retrospective and negative semantics. However, there are many factors that can conflict with prosodic characteristics at the dictionary level: a certain communicative task (for example, pure narrative, causality, eventfulness), phraseological coherence, homogeneous members, the use of numerals. If we describe the potential accent behavior of a word in the dictionary, then it is necessary, at least in the preface, to describe the potential obstacles that in real speech can negate the prosodic characteristic of a particular meaning of a polysemantic word or one of the homonyms. Obviously, not all words in the dictionary (and even, most likely, a minority) require such prosodic information. On the other hand, other meanings are so closely related to phrasal prosody that this fact cannot be neglected in lexicography.